The Idea
Before there was an organisation, there was an idea. And the idea was this: that in a country as loud, as religiously saturated, and as socially conformist as Nigeria, there ought to exist a space, however small, however provisional, where a person could belong without performing. Without invoking God before every sentence. Without declaring ethnic allegiance before every transaction. Without submitting to the theological consensus that governs public life so completely that to dissent from it is not merely unfashionable but dangerous.
The humanist association was conceived as that space. Not as a political party, not as a professional body, not as a networking club for the ambitious. As something rarer and more necessary: a community of people united not by what they believed but by how they thought. By the commitment to reason over revelation, to evidence over assertion, to the dignity of every human being regardless of what they believed or did not believe, regardless of who they loved, regardless of how they identified. In a society that organises itself almost entirely around religious and ethnic identity, this was not a modest proposition. It was a radical one.
Humanism, properly understood, is not merely the absence of religion. It is an affirmative philosophy, one that locates the source of meaning, morality, and human flourishing not in supernatural authority but in human capacity: in reason, in empathy, in the collective project of reducing suffering and expanding dignity. It is a philosophy with a long and serious intellectual tradition, one that has shaped the development of science, law, human rights, and democratic governance across centuries. To build an institution around these principles in Nigeria was to attempt something genuinely significant.
The idea deserves to be stated clearly and without irony before anything else is said. Because what follows is difficult, and the difficulty only makes sense against the backdrop of how much the idea mattered, and still matters, to the people for whom it was built.
The people it was built for
Nigeria is a country of approximately two hundred and twenty million people, the overwhelming majority of whom identify as either Christian or Muslim. Religion is not merely a private matter here. It is the organising principle of social life — of community, of identity, of political allegiance, of moral authority. To be Nigerian, in most social contexts, is to be loudly and publicly faithful. The call to prayer and the church bell do not merely mark time in Nigerian cities. They mark belonging.
For those who cannot make that declaration honestly, the atheist, the agnostic, the secular humanist, the person whose relationship with inherited faith has broken down under the pressure of honest inquiry, the social cost is real and significant. Professional exclusion, family rupture, community ostracism, and in some contexts, physical danger. Nigeria does not have a comfortable place for the person who has stepped outside the religious consensus. The irreligious Nigerian exists, in many social spaces, as a kind of ghost, present but unacknowledged, tolerated at best, persecuted at worst.
Then there are those whose identity places them outside the moral framework that religion enforces. The queer Nigerian — gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, gender nonconforming, who exists under conditions of legal criminalisation, social contempt, and in many cases, organised violence. The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014 does not merely prohibit same-sex relationships. It criminalises association, advocacy, and visibility. To be openly queer in Nigeria is to accept a level of exposure and risk that the majority of Nigerians will never face.
For these people — the irreligious, the queer, the secular, the doubter, the person who belongs nowhere else, the humanist association was not simply an interesting intellectual proposition. It was the possibility of home. A place where membership did not require the performance of an identity one did not hold. Where life could be celebrated and death mourned without supernatural scaffolding. Where a person could walk in as they were and find, perhaps for the first time, that who they were was enough.
This is why the stakes of what follows are higher than they would be for any ordinary organisation. The humanist association was not built for the comfortable. It was built for the invisible.
The cracks before the foundation
What happened next is familiar to anyone who has watched Nigerian institutions up close. It is so familiar, in fact, that its familiarity is itself part of the indictment.
The governance crisis that emerged within the association did not arrive from outside. It grew from within, quietly at first and then with gathering speed, fed by the same forces that undermine institutions across Nigerian public life: the positioning by “humanists” who feel that their achievements and ego means that they are institutions by themselves, the concentration of power in individuals rather than structures, ignoring membership in the resolution of conflicts but building personality cults, the absence of transparent and enforceable accountability mechanisms, and the gradual displacement of institutional purpose by personal positioning.
Concerned members who looked closely at the organisation’s constitutional foundations discovered a series of troubling realities. The board of trustees, the body charged with providing oversight and continuity, had allowed its tenure to expire without renewal or elections. An interim leadership arrangement, intended as a temporary bridge, had become indefinite, operating without a clear timeline, without democratic mandate, and without the transparency that the organisation’s founding principles demanded. The constitution itself — the document that should have been the shared property of every member, was not readily accessible to the membership. Financial records were similarly opaque.
These are not minor administrative oversights. In an organisation whose explicit founding values should include democratic governance, transparency, and member participation, they represent a fundamental contradiction between what the association proclaimed and how it operated. The humanist association was preaching one thing and practising another. The rational institution was behaving irrationally. The body committed to critical inquiry was not subjecting itself to critical inquiry.
Efforts were made, by a group of concerned members, to address these issues through legitimate channels. Formal communications were submitted. Meetings were held. Proposals were drafted for a caretaker committee, for democratic elections, for transparent financial management, for constitutional access for all members. The response from those in positions of authority was, for the most part, silence, apathy and the declaration that any humanist can form his own group, as if it’s a competition to have as many splinter groups as possible, as long as their “Daddy G.O.” statuses are preserved.
The familiar Nigerian machinery
At this point, an observer familiar with Nigerian institutional life would recognise the pattern. Not because humanists are uniquely susceptible to it, but because no Nigerian institution has proven immune to it. Political parties that began as liberation movements became vehicles for the enrichment of their founders. Religious bodies that began as communities of spiritual practice became empires of financial accumulation. Professional associations that began as platforms for collective advocacy became arenas for personal advancement. Humanitarian NGOs that began as responses to genuine suffering became competitions for donor funding and performative outreaches.
The machinery is always the same. Power concentrates. Accountability mechanisms weaken or are never properly established. Transparency becomes selective. The founders or early leaders begin, consciously or unconsciously, to conflate the institution with themselves, to treat its resources, its reputation, and its direction as extensions of their personal authority. Those who question this conflation are managed, marginalised, or excluded. And the original mission, the idea that preceded the institution, recedes.
A related disease compounds the problem: the dependence on external funding. When an organisation’s survival depends on satisfying foreign donors rather than serving local communities, something fundamental shifts. The reports that get written are the ones that impress funders, not the ones that reflect what is actually happening on the ground. The projects that get designed are the ones that tick the right boxes, not the ones that address the real needs of the people the organisation claims to represent. And when the funding cycle ends, the activity stops — revealing that what looked like a movement was, in practice, a transaction. This pattern has played out across NGOs, Humanitarian Organisations, even humanist organisations on the continent with a consistency that can no longer be attributed to coincidence. It is structural.
Alongside donor dependency comes another corruption: the rise of those who have mastered the vocabulary of humanism without internalising its substance. They speak fluently about reason and science and secular values. They attend the right conferences, cultivate the right international contacts, get the right seats and sponsorship and present well to the outside observer. But within their own communities, their work is thin. The organic structures are not built. The vulnerable are not defended. The marginalised are not served. What is built, instead, is a personal brand , a reputation assembled from the language of the movement rather than from the work of it.
What makes the humanist association’s experience particularly painful, and particularly instructive, is the irony at its centre. These are people who pride themselves on reason. On critical thinking. On the examined life. On the ability to identify logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and the self-serving distortions that afflict human reasoning. And yet, when the machinery arrived, it arrived wearing the same clothes it always wears, namely: the language of organisational necessity, of stability, of protecting the institution — and it was not recognised for what it was. Or it was recognised and accommodated anyway, which amounts to the same thing.
Nigeria does this to everything. That is not an excuse. It is a diagnosis. And a diagnosis is only useful if it leads somewhere.
By Kenneth Eze
Kenneth Eze is a secular humanist, community paralegal, and advocate for those whose identities make them targets in Nigeria. He is a regular contributor to the African Humanist Journal.